Contrary to its name, the KitchenAid Smart Thermometer isn’t smart enough to cook your food for you. It really just monitors the temperature and reports it via the companion app. What makes it kind of smart, though, is that it tells you exactly when to remove food from the heat source, ensuring you never leave your dishes cooking too long and sparing you from the icky taste of dry, overcooked grub,
A connected meat probe, the device sticks into your meat like any thermometer probe, allowing you to see exact temperatures inside the food in real time like an instant-read thermometer. Instead of showing it on a built-in display or a console outside, though, it sends the data straight to the app, allowing you to keep an eye on the steak in the kamado grill while doing other things around the house.
The KitchenAid Smart Thermometer looks like any regular meat probe, consisting of a metal spike with a cylinder-shaped plastic enclosure on its head. The spike houses a pair of temperature sensors (one at the tip and one in the middle), so it can check the temperature on two fronts, while the enclosure contains a Bluetooth radio that allows it to transmit its readings at distances of up to 285 feet. All transmissions are picked up by the companion app, where you can see the temperature readings in real time.
The app, by the way, offers guided cooking instructions, so it won’t just show you the internal temperature of the food, it can tell you when you need to adjust the heat settings for the grill/oven, when you need to flip the food over, or when it’s time to take the food out for resting. It also offers a graph view that makes it easy to visualize the cooking process. While probably not perfect, these things should be plenty useful for newer cooks, sparing them from the usual trial and error novice cooks often do.
The KitchenAid Smart Thermometer is fully waterproof, ensuring it can splashed, spilled on, and covered in all sorts of fluid with no issues. It’s dishwasher-safe, too, so you can throw it in with the rest of the dirty dishes for easy cleaning. The battery, which is housed inside the probe’s enclosure, can power it for up to 24 hours of temperature monitoring between charges. In case it drains out in the middle of cooking, you can do a five-minute quick charge that lets it run for another five hours.
The app, by the way, also lets you save data up to 20 cooking sessions, in case you want something to refer to later, while offering several timers and alerts that you can use on the fly. In case you want to monitor things while going out of Bluetooth range, the outfit says you can turn on Range Extender Mode, which, basically, pairs the probe to an internet-connected device (e.g. your PC at home), so you can check how things are going on the app while doing a quick run at the local mini-mart.
The KitchenAid Smart Thermometer is available now, priced at $99.99 for a single probe and $199.99 for a dual probe set.